Voice comparisons are used in speaker identification, recognition, authentication, and verification. False alarms occur in these methods when two voice samples that are different are compared and determined to be identical. False alarms reduce the performance of automated voice comparison methods. There is a need for a voice comparison method that reduces false alarms. The present invention is such a method.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,241,329, entitled “CONTINUOUS SPEECH RECOGNITION METHOD FOR IMPROVING FALSE ALARM RATES,” discloses a method of recognizing keywords in continuous speech with improved false alarm rates by characterizing each keyword to be recognized by a template, selecting a sequence of patterns from a signal, comparing the pattern to the templates, determining which template matches the pattern, and applying a prosodic test to determine if the determination is a false alarm or not. The present invention does not characterize keywords with templates, compare patterns to templates, or apply a prosodic test to determine false alarms as does U.S. Pat. No. 4,241,329. U.S. Pat. No. 4,241,329 is hereby incorporated by reference into the specification of the present invention.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,076,055 and 6,931,375 and U.S. Pat. Appl. No. 20050143996, each entitled “SPEAKER VERIFICATION METHOD,” each disclose a method of verifying that a speaker is who the speaker claims to be by generating a code book, acquiring a number of training utterances from each of a number of speakers, receiving a number of test utterances, comparing the test utterances to the training utterances to form a number of decisions, weighting each decision, and combining the weighted decisions to form a verification decision. The present invention does not generate a code book, acquire a number of training utterances from each of a number of speakers, weight decisions, or combine weighted decisions to form a verification decision as does U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,076,055 and 6,931,375 and U.S. Pat. Appl. No. 20050143996. U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,076,055 and 6,931,375 and U.S. Pat. Appl. No. 20050143996 are hereby incorporated by reference into the specification of the present invention.